Volume 41, April 2015, Pages 209–217
Studying against your will: Motivational interference in action
Highlights
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- We investigated motivational interference effects during everyday studying.
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- Positive affect was significantly lower when an action alternative was present.
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- Motivational and volitional action conflicts yielded similar impairments.
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- Everyday study interference specifically predicted students' academic functioning.
Abstract
Motivational
interference refers to affective, cognitive, and behavioral impairments
during a focal activity due to conflicting action tendencies. In the
present study, we focused on antecedents and domain-specific
consequences of motivational interference during everyday study
activities using an experience sampling approach. Fifty-eight university
students provided real-time reports on their daily studying activities (N
= 672) over the course of one week. They reported on their momentary
affect, whether they experienced motivational conflict during their
study activities, and, if so, indicated when this feeling emerged. After
the experience sampling period, they reported on their academic and
social adaptation as well as their study satisfaction, and rated their
relative performance. Compared with non-conflicted studying activities,
we found considerably lower positive affect during conflicted studying.
Conflicts that existed before the initiation of the study activity, and
conflicts that emerged during studying, yielded affective impairments.
As expected, aggregated conflict experiences negatively predicted
measures of academic functioning, but not students' social adaptation.
The discussion focuses on motivational antecedents of interference
effects during self-regulated learning.
Keywords
- Academic functioning;
- Motivational conflict;
- Motivational interference;
- Positive affect;
- Self-regulated learning
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
